personal opinions and thoughts

ios

Political satire

I had too much time on my hands in-between jobs, so I figured I would have some fun. I went to Florida to babysit my teenage sister during her spring break, but I quickly realized it was a pretty boring task. When we weren’t at the beach or driving, we would watch election coverage on TV. Political tensions were flying high. In-fighting within both political parties. Just bring out the popcorn. I was really rooting for Bernie, yet it was Trump who was getting the most press.

I decided to code up a little game in order to capitalize on the Trump love/hatred that was sweeping the country.

Trump Wall has a very trivial gameplay. You are helping the newly elected President Donald J. Trump fulfill his (filthy) promise to build the wall along US-Mexican border. You do so by tapping the square outline of bricks. Obviously, the wall is built from the bottom up (you’ll be surprised how many people get confused by that). And since you start from the bottom, that’s a perfect place for me to place an advertisement banner. The more clicks, the better 😉
You complete the level by filling in all the bricks. Once you get all the bricks, you hear Trump proclaim that “the wall just got 10 feel taller”, and the background moves up towards the sky.

The background is usually a random “Welcome to xyz” sign for the southern states that share a border with Mexico. As you complete more levels, you eventually reach one of Trump’s planes or helicopters. Naturally, the game does not have score “points”. Instead, the score represents a number of pesos spent on building the wall.

It obviously wouldn’t be a Trump game, if it didn’t feature Trump’s (in)famous sound clips! (“Who’s gonna pay for the wall? Mexico! Who? Mexico!” “We’re going to have strong, incredible borders!”, and so on). I went through countless YouTube videos of his actual speeches to collect them. I cannot believe people are buying this racist stuff. What a world we are living in!

But what about Bernie? Well, I included Bernie in the game too! As the levels get harder, Bernie’s election stickers stand in the way of some of the bricks. You then really need to mash them in order to make Bernie disappear.

Overall it was a fun side project. Political satire is a great way of poking fun at our presidential candidates. I had no issues publishing the game to Google Play, but Apple gave me some serious grief. I was rejected multiple times and had to remove a majority of the controversial content. I understand they are just protecting themselves, but how is it my fault that we have such a “tremendous” presidential candidate? 😉

My friends at TT are really busy trying to get the mobile clients out the door and into production. TT’s twitter account is buzzing with all kinds of photos and videos. I am really happy and proud of how far my apps have come. The end result is looking beautiful and I am sure the end-users will be delighted by both the design and functionality.

I really enjoyed working on TT Mobile, as it presented a very unique set of challenges. How to effectively push price updates over potentially slow cellular connections? How to ensure users don’t accidentally place trades (butt trading anyone)? And how to effectively integrate with the rest of TT’s eco-system? I think the team did a splendid job and the apps are rock solid. One disappointing fact is that both Android and iOS apps could have been released over a year ago, had we chosen to re-use logic. There are ways to write the code once, and use it verbatim on multiple mobile platforms (naturally the look-and-feel needs to be done separately, so that the app feels “native”). I have long argued with the executives and advocated for shared business logic, since it seemed like a no-brainer.

Shorter time-to-market. In today’s fast-moving world it’s imperative to be there first.

Lower cost of development.

Less bugs.

Parallel releases on multiple platforms.

Lower long-term maintenance costs.

Less testing effort.

Other companies are not as short-sighted and have long recognized the benefits of writing the common logic once, instead of re-implementing it for every platform. Xamarin has their cross-platform C#. Google is pushing Java with its ability to share code between Android, iOS and the web. Dropbox uses C++ for shared logic. RemObjects has their cross-platform Swift. Not to mention frameworks like Flash and Cordova. I still cannot believe that the decision makers would rather have us maintain two separate codebases, but I guess you need to be good at engineering to comprehend the benefits.

On a positive note, I am extremely pleased with the aesthetics of TT Mobile apps; graphical design and usability are essential. Nobody wants to use an app that looks “f-ugly” or that feels cumbersome. Folks at TT spent countless hours doing usability studies and polishing the design. Trust me – a lot of love went into making of these apps. They look awesome, they are snappy and I really hope you’ll enjoy them 🙂